Now, first, I understand why the landing was covered. Something goes wrong during it, and there's a historically major story.
But reading that story just now, and seeing how horribly the media covered the Boston bombing, shows that, in general, the media haven't learned their lesson about reporting news rather than just acting as stenographers. Very few at the time questioned the need for the plane landing, nor the taxpayer dollars spent on it, nor how horrible the timing of it was with tens of thousands of troops still in harm's way.

And I'd hate to see how it would have been covered if Twitter were around back then.

I was a wire editor newsside then, filling at least 4 pages a day with war news. They asked me to cut it back, since it was Mission Accomplished. But I kept seeing stories about stuff going on there ...

One editor I worked for around 2005-06 wanted us to cut back because she believed people got sick of reading about the killings day in, day out. I did understand her viewpoint.

Getting back to Baron's point..... one of the things that bothers me about how the industry is going is too often we get in such a hurry to try to be the first to report any snipit of news that we no longer bother to find out if we were are reporting is true. News and sports.

An interesting display at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Fla., indeed underscores how poorly that day's activities were covered in the press and then misrepresented by the partisan pundits.